reaching out for military help from the Kingdom of Poland, in 1387 the Gedyminide
dynasty formed an alliance with Poland and adopted Catholicism for the
Lithuanian elite. They did not, however, impose Catholicism on their Ukrainian
and Belarus’an Orthodox elites or peasants. Over time the dynastic union more
tightly intertwined the Grand Duchy’s elites with Polish culture—they adopted
Polish noble and urban institutions and intensified the dynastic union into a full-
fledged political federation in the“Commonwealth”in 1569. Polish and Grand
Duchy lands all participated in wave upon wave of European cultural trends
(Renaissance, Reformation, Counter-Reformation, and Enlightenment); the
Grand Duchy’s educated Orthodox elites in turn became in the late seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries a powerful conduit of European ideas into Russia.
While Moscow was occupied consolidating its power over neighboring principal-
ities to the mid-fifteenth century, the dissolution of the Horde changed the landscape
on the lower Volga and steppe. Splinter groups of the Golden Horde claimed
traditional trade emporia—khanates had arisen at Kazan by 1445 and at Astrakhan
by the 1460s, both claiming charismatic descent from Chinggis Khan. The Girey
clan, also Chinggisid, claimed control over the Crimea and its Black Sea steppe by
- While the Kazan and Astrakhan khanates were busy profiting from steady
transit trade of furs and oriental goods up and down the Volga, the Crimean Tatars
maintained the age-old raiding and trading steppe lifestyle, dominating the active
slave trade of the region. Their merchants transported slaves from the Caucasus to
their emporia; their slaving raids into East Slavic territories brought in thousands.
Further to the east, in the early sixteenth century the Nogai Horde occupied steppe
lands on either side of the Volga from the Sea of Azov to the Aral Sea south of the
Urals, alternately raiding and trading with Russia, bringing thousands of horses
annually to Muscovy for sale. South of them, the Great Horde coalesced on the
lower Volga in the wake of thefinal destruction of Sarai by Timur (Tamerlane) in the
first years of thefifteenth century. Like the Nogais, the Great Horde traded and
raided as Russia gradually pushed into the steppe over the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, but neither established the settled political permanence of the other three
khanates. Eventually, as we will see, they were co-opted into Russian service, but in
thefifteenth through seventeenth centuries all these forces in one way or another
profited from, or harassed, transit trade down the Volga, Don, and Dnieper. Moving
east, the Kuchum khanate in western Siberia similarly claimed Chinggisid legacy, but
was less potent than its Kazan and Crimean counterparts.
Like its Gedyminide rivals, Moscow assembled territory with economic and
politically strategic goals in the fourteenth- andfifteenth-century vacuum of power.
To its northwest Novgorod was an obstacle and target (see Figure 2.2). Founded in
the 800s, Novgorod had been the second city in the Kyiv Rus’state. Its merchant
elite had wrested control of the city from the Rus’princes already in the mid-twelfth
century and developed an urban republican government, based on communal
assemblies at the neighborhood and municipal level. Over time the elite dominated
elected office such that many have called Novgorod more an oligarchy than
republic. The city flourished on export fur trade, particularly in the 1300s,
becoming a member of the German Hansa network of trading ports. Novgorod
46 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801